Your family’s mortal enemy is Saudi Arabia. One of the most knowledgeable people in the world regarding the dynamics in Pakistan and Afghanistan is former mountaineer, military veteran, and director of the Central Asia Institute Greg Mortenson. Mr. Mortenson wrote the book Three Cups of Tea and recorded the audio version. In this indispensable book, Mr. Mortenson tells readers that Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabi sect has for years been building mosques in Pakistan along the Afghan border. Sheikhs from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait go to Pakistan with suitcases of rupees and take the best mosque students back with them to Saudi Arabia. Upon their return to Pakistan, the boys have to take four wives, exponentially increasing the number of those tied to Wahhabi extremism. In effect, as Greg notes, “the bulk of [Saudi] oil wealth pouring in from the Gulf is aimed at Pakistan’s most virulent incubator of religious extremism-Wahhabi madrassas.”Ain-Al-Yaqeen” reported that the Al Haramain Foundation had built “1,100 mosques, schools, and Islamic centers” in Pakistan and other Muslim countries. Mortenson goes on to say that “the International Islamic Relief Organization, which the 9/11 Commission would later accuse of directly supporting the Taliban and Al Qaeda, completed the construction of thirty-eight hundred mosques … and employed six thousand teachers, many of them in Pakistan.”
Mortenson writes that back in December of 2000,
Finally, Mortenson writes that “Ahmed Rashid, perhaps the world’s leading authority on the link between madrassa education and the rise of extremist Islam, estimates that more than eighty thousand of their young madrassa students became Taliban recruits…the World Bank concluded that 15 to 20 percent of madrassa students were receiving military training, along with a curriculum that emphasized jihad and hatred of the West.”
As for the Obama administration’s understating and recognition of the complexities of the Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Afghanistan issue, I’ll let you be the judge.
